how to get your taste buds back during a cold

The study appears in JAMA Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery. However, even after adjusting for the possible contribution of age, 29% of the patients still appeared to have hypogeusia as a result of COVID-19. “Taste and smell disorders increase in incidence with aging, and therefore age adjustments allow us to better compare with ‘normal’ function,” Prof. The taste buds of some participants may have already lost some of their ability to discriminate between basic tastes simply due to normal aging. However, the Taste Strips test confirmed hypogeusia - a loss of basic tastes - in 42% of these individuals. More than half of the participants who reported problems with basic taste perception actually had typical gustation. They gave them a range of validated taste and smell tests, including a Sniffin’ Sticks test of olfaction and a Taste Strips test of basic taste perception. They identified 105 patients at the university’s ear, nose, and throat outpatient clinic who reported a disruption of their ability to taste sweet, sour, salty, or bitter more than 3 months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Researchers led by the University of Trieste in Italy set out to discover what proportion of people who say they have trouble with basic taste sensation after COVID-19 have possible damage to their taste buds. “This study highlights that true taste disturbance is, however, also more common than we had thought,” she added. “This leads to over-reporting of taste loss, and it has been largely assumed that this accounts for most reported alterations in taste disturbance after COVID,” she told Medical News Today. “There is some difficulty in self-rating true taste loss versus reduced flavor perception, which is a consequence of smell loss - as usually, we smell flavor through a process of retronasal olfaction: chewing breaks up food, releasing odors that are forced into the nose as we exhale,” said Claire Hopkins, professor of rhinology at Guy’s Hospital, London, in the United Kingdom, and one of the authors of the new study.

The technical name for the loss of the ability to smell, as opposed to taste, is anosmia. This is known as retronasal olfaction.Īdditionally, the tongue contains taste buds that perceive the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, adding to the overall taste sensation.Ĭomplete loss of the ability of the tongue to perceive these basic tastes is known as ageusia, while decreased sensitivity is known as hypogeusia.Ī third condition, dysgeusia, involves a persistent, unpleasant taste in the mouth - such as sour, metallic, or rancid - that can taint the flavor of all food and drink. Chewing food releases odors, which sense receptors in the back of the nose detect.

How to get your taste buds back during a cold